Month: December 2016

It seems that applying disciplined engineering methods is sometimes looked down upon in my department and more valuable is put on "napkin" design and trial and error fabrication. To be fair we do have some very intense projects that we have outsourced to PE firms for final verification of design to specific industry standards. And I don't take concern with all other projects that will never be used outside of our facility. But IMO we have a few projects that should really be held to higher standard.

So what gives?

Am I just putting to much emphasis on these middle of road projects and that usually some napkin math is all that's needed and the "we'll figure it out" mentally is actually more practical vs doing detailed design with optimization of material usage, fabrication, labor and overall cost, generally following a more structured Systems engineering approach?

Office relationsVery late with following up on a director who took me out too lunch, would like to reopen the line of communication with him

I greatly appreciate and need advice. I am not too proud of this at all and this has been slowly eating away at me for half a year.

So back in the summer, at a company picnic, I was on the same soccer team with a new director (not mine). He accidently took my soccer bag, and just as I was leaving he returned it and asked me out to lunch and I agreed. Also for context, I was a year into my first job out of uni.

I was nervous for this lunch, as the thought in my head rang, there is no free lunch, there is no free lunch, there is no free lunch, so I expected he wanted information, but I did not know how much information or what type he wanted and how well I can provide information.

Anyways, we have lunch and of course, being a newcomer, he wanted information on how things worked. I was able to answer more of the technical questions (I work at a large engineering firm), but not so much the process questions. Anyways I became nervous because I realized how much I didn't know and became self-concious on the sufficiency of my answers.

At the end, he paid, said this was a good meeting, I dont remember if he was being honest or not. I promised to follow up, but I haven't followed up with him for 6 months. I see him like once every 2 weeks in passing. Twice I tried to engage with him, in passing but he was a little dismissive and clearly not happy with me.

Now I don't want anything from this man, I don't need anything from this man, but I know he feels like I blew him off and I don't want him to feel like that and I would like to reopen the line of communication and make peace with him, for the simple reason that my gut instinct tells me this is the right thing to do.

Any advice, perspectives, viewpoints will greatly be appreciated.

EDIT: Added management flair, that doesn't best describe the problem, but it is a people problem

Earlier this year I went down during construction the the Wynyard walkway in Sydney. The pedestrian walkway is designed to take 20000 pedestrian movements an hour. The tunnel is 180m long and 8m wide and 3.5m high at a cost of $306 million. The tunnel will half the time it takes to get to the station.